Coffee Blog

Colombia Part 1

This past February, Gervais and I got to go to Colombia to visit our newest partner farm, Finca La Loma and its owner Jesus. After having visited coffee farms in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, we more or less assumed that we knew what to expect. It is amazing how wrong we were. The coffee culture in Colombia is different from anything we’ve ever seen. And it’s safe for you to assume that it is different from what you expect as well. Colombia has a bad reputation because of the drug culture; most people assume that coffee in Colombia is only grown to cover the export of drugs, but they could not be more wrong. Colombians are serious about their coffee in ways that other countries only wish they were. And because of that, Colombia can boast some really outstanding beans!

You see, an organization in Colombia called CAFEXCOOP actually has control of the coffee that is exported from Colombia. They require that coffee meet a certain standard before it is exported, and have government checks multiple times along the export process to verify that the coffee being exported is 100% Colombian and of outstanding quality. For the people of the world who aren’t big on government involvement and regulation, this seems too controlling- but at the end of it all, it actually benefits the farmers in Colombia who are serious about growing the best coffee possible.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be posting a few different blogs about our trip and what we learned about the coffee process in Colombia. You’ll get to learn exactly how many steps it takes to get Colombian coffee from the farm to your cup. And man is it a lot of steps. We’d love for you to stay tuned, but between now and then, please feel free to check out our Flickr album with pictures from our trip. Enjoy!